Sanjoy Ghose, my late husband, inspires social activists in India
Sanjoy and Sumita Ghose at Sanjoy’s graduation from Oxford University in 1985
By Sumita Ghose*
February 4, 2022
I met Sanjoy Ghose in 1977, when we were 17, during our first year B.A. Economics Class at Elphinstone College, Mumbai University. I, and most who knew him, called him Joy. He was always dressed in a khadi (hand-spun) kurta and pajama and wore Kolhapuri leather sandals. He spoke softly, earnestly and smiled and laughed often.
While in college, Sanjoy worked part-time as a researcher for the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy, edited the college magazine, ran a literary club, and won numerous debating awards.
Unlike the rest of us, who were still figuring out what we wanted to do with our lives, Sanjoy was clear that he wanted to work in rural India. The calling came from within. While at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, he was president of the Interact Club, which organized efforts to help the less fortunate.
He opted for a course in Rural Development, which was offered for the first time by the university. Very few students in our class took the course. Sanjoy would disappear for days, sometimes even weeks, doing field research among the tribals in rural Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital. He did not talk much about what he experienced during those trips. But I know that the vast inequalities he found, between rural and urban India, strengthened his resolve to devote his life to advancing rural economic growth and help reduce poverty.
After graduating from college, he was admitted to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, the top MBA school in India. Instead, he pursued a diploma at the newly set up Institute for Rural Management (IRMA), in Anand, Gujarat. There he earned the distinction of being among the lowest paid in his graduating class. He chose to work for the Tribhuvandas Foundation, on a social project in Gujarat, rather than take up a management job at a milk co-operative or some other agriculture related business, like most of his other classmates.
We were married in Mumbai in January 1984. Later that year, Sanjoy was awarded a scholarship by India-based INLAKS foundation to study for a Master’s in Agricultural Economics at Oxford University.
Returning to India in 1986, he took up the challenge to set up the URMUL Trust in Loonkaransar. It was founded by the URMUL Dairy, a co-operative of farmers, in Bikaner, Rajasthan. The trust started as a social service organization, focused on maternal and child healthcare. But he soon grew it to include treating patients suffering from tuberculosis, helping poor farmers impacted by droughts, providing safe drinking water, setting up schools and other projects.
Two years later, he enrolled for a Master’s in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S., after receiving a Hubert Humphrey fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of State.
Returning to URMUL, Sanjoy used the tools and skills he learned at Johns Hopkins, Oxford and IRMA. But his guiding star remained combining constructive action with peaceful struggle for social justice, which he adopted from the philosophy and work of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India’s non-violent movement for independence from British rule.
In 1991, Sanjoy was a key organizer of the Nahar Yatra, (a protest march), in Rajasthan, which highlighted the perils of large-scale irrigation projects in the state’s desert region. In the process, he incurred the anger of politicians, policy makers, administration officials, big farmers and others. They were eager that the model of the “green revolution” should trickle down from Punjab to the desert of Rajasthan. This was despite, as Sanjoy pointed out, the problems of water logging and land denudation, which were occurring in Punjab, making it a not so green revolution.
Realizing that his constructive work needed to be accompanied by raising uncomfortable questions, Sanjoy started writing a monthly column in English called Village Voice. It was published in The Indian Express. In his simple, blunt and jargon-free style, he sought to convince readers and decision makers about the challenges facing desert communities in Rajasthan: caste and gender dynamics as well as the politics around drought, drought relief efforts and water access.
Sanjoy inspired and motivated others like no one else I know. Not surprisingly, our team, including volunteers, grew to about 500 in five years, including local men and women on their first jobs, as well as young idealists from Mumbai, Delhi and other larger cities. To encourage others to acquire leadership skills and to provide them space for professional and personal growth, Sanjoy helped incubate several URMUL organizations, which coordinated their work: Setu, (women’s and chiidren’s rights), Seemant, Jyoti, Khejdi and Marusthali Bunkar Vikas Samiti (a co-operative of handloom weavers). They continue to operate today.
Sanjoy and I spent ten years living in Loonkaransar. Our children Joyita and Anando were born there in 1986 and 1988, respectively.
In 1995, Sanjoy felt it was time to move onto another challenge. We lived in New Delhi for a couple of years, where he started CHARKHA – a communication network to help social workers and activists write about and share their campaigns, failures and successes with a wider audience. Sanjoy got many of the stories published in The Indian Express and other major Indian newspapers.
But his heart remained in rural India. In 1996, he decided to move to the North East – to Majuli in Assam, an island located at the mouth of the Brahmaputra River. At the time, there were physical attacks on non-Assamese – mainly Bengalis - in the state by United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a banned, violent, ultra-nationalist Assamese group.
There were also conflicts between local government contractors and poor farmers. A major economic problem faced by the farmers was the annual loss of cultivable land, due to the erosion caused by river floods during the monsoon season. This meant that several families lost their income.
Sanjoy felt very strongly that tackling the erosion, combined with a peaceful struggle, would reduce, if not eliminate, the violence. We started with a small team of four, funded by the Ashoka Foundation and a MacArthur Fellowship. In less than a year, as we achieved results and our work expanded, the team grew to ten people.
In 1997, about 30,000 men and women volunteers raised the height of the river bank, for the length of about a mile, by piling stones and soil and planting shrubs to hold the soil together. The barrier reduced the flood erosion that year. In the process, it deprived local contractors, ULFA and other politicians and bureaucrats from pocketing millions of Rupees that were allocated by the government for annual flood protection and relief measures.
We heard that the ULFA leaders were unhappy with our success. But Sanjoy was confident that he could convince them that working together would help build a peaceful and prosperous region in Assam. He was also of the view that people were innately good and will accept an alternate route which is in their interest.
So, on July 4, he agreed to meet local ULFA leaders in a remote part of Majuli. I wished him good luck as he left on his bicycle, unarmed, his usual cheery, positive self. I was apprehensive as we were already facing opposition from ULFA. But Sanjoy and Chandan, a local colleague, decided to take the chance.
I never saw him after that day. The ULFA gang killed him, dumping his body - whose remains are yet to be found - in the river. Chandan returned saying he was separated from Sanjoy and managed to escape.
Joy’s life, his vision for a just society, and his work remain an inspiration to everyone who worked with him, or knew however briefly, whether in Gujarat, Rajasthan, or in Assam and in other states of North East India.
I miss you every day, Joy. Today we celebrate your life and your work. You remain in our hearts, an inspiration forever.
*Sumita Ghose wrote this on December 7, 2020, Sanjoy Ghose’s 60th birth anniversary. Based in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb, she is the managing director of rangSutra crafts India, a community owned social enterprise she founded in 2006. She earned an MA in economics from Bombay University.
Joyita Ghose, Sumita and Sanjoy’s daughter, is working in the field of sustainability in the U.S., after completing a Masters in Environment Management from Yale University. Their son Anando Ghose, based in Auroville, Tamil Nadu, works remotely for a technology company. He married Shrimayee in 2020.